AA’s Real Success Rate

Has AA really saved millions and millions of people? Find out in this video.

Link to theadultchild101 video about me https://youtu.be/gz1UcoGZqew (This user has since been banned from YouTube.)

For the success rate I quoted Matthew Leichter with permission. His qualifications are as follows from www.LinkedIn.com

“Finishing DrPH in Epidemiology this year. Master’s Degree in Mathematical Statistics at the University of Kentucky. Over 10 years with healthcare modeling experience in R and SQL. Experience with medical trending, outcomes, and strategy. Experience with competitive analysis.”

Leichter stated the following,

“There are 1,400,000 people who seek treatment every year in the US. The current most effective treatment according to clinical studies is the Sinclair Method, where a 2001 meta-analysis showed an effective rate of 78% across one year. That’s 1,120,000 lives cured of alcohol addiction. Another meta-analysis from Harvard Psychiatrist Lance Dodes showed AA has a 5% recovery rate. That’s 70,000 a year.

This means that by offering AA treatment as the only option in an area, a total of 1,050,000 alcoholics relapse a year that could be sober or moderating right now, due to AA.
But it gets worse. If we look at that number of 70,000 a year across the 80 years since it’s inception, it means AA has successfully gotten 5,600,000 to stay sober for one year, and following the survival curve of their own surveys, less than. 01% stayed sober for more than 20 years.
That means since it’s inception, AA has successfully kept sober a total of 56,000 people for their lifetime and prevented successful treatment of 84,000,000 across 80 years, a number consistent with the current number of 15,200,000 with untreated AUD right now according to the CDC.
That’s a loss ratio of 1500. For every 1 person AA saves, they sacrifice 1500.
So the next time someone tells you AA has helped millions of lives, tell them it’s actually only 56,000 people they have successfully helped in their entire history AND they have sacrificed over 84,000,000. When someone asks what the loss ratio is, tell them that for every 1 person that gets sober in AA, another 1500 fail.
So the argument that AA works for some and it’s not all that bad should be countered with, “Yes, AA has worked for 1 in 1500. How is that an effective program? That is a worse survival rate than cancer.”
– Matthew Leichter, Chief Epidemiologist, The Goodman Center.